We will have to eventually reshape society to allow for days long blackouts after the fossil fuel gets scarce.

Or they might have to charge their EV's during the day instead of at night. Or run air conditioning only when it's hot out during the day. O the horror.

Trends in the US:
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Forbes
Dec 18, 2017
Utilities Closed Dozens Of Coal Plants In 2017. Here Are The 6 Most Important.

Utility coal power closures driven by market economics were a regular occurrence throughout 2017. While President Donald Trump’s “Energy Dominance” agenda gave the false impression that federal efforts could revive coal, 27 coal-fired plants totaling 22 gigawatts (GW) of capacity were announced for early closure or conversion in 2017 – roughly one every 15 days since Trump’s election.

U.S. electricity generation economics have completely reversed. Building new coal is more expensive than building new renewable energy across the U.S. , and in many parts of the country, keeping existing coal plants open is more expensive than building new wind turbines (and solar, in some places). From 2007 to 2016, 531 coal units representing 55.6 GW of capacity were retired across the U.S., at an increasingly rapid pace.

The coal plants announced for early closure in 2017 are younger in age and larger in size than ever before, and utilities are replacing shuttered capacity with clean energy. The reasons why utilities are choosing to close coal plants are just as informative as how they’re choosing to replace them. Six specific closures show why this trend will continue into 2018 despite Trump’s bluster.
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Might squeeze out another 40 good years of business as usual with fossil fuel back up before the real hardships begin to happen.

Depends on who is in charge. If we have more visionaries pushing for a rapid changeover to renewables, then we will have centuries of fossil fuels to use - although at that point, it would be more accurate to call them "fossil feedstocks" because their primary use will be as chemical feedstocks for plastics/fertilizers/pharmaceuticals, with a smaller amount going to fuel hard-to-replace applications (long distance aviation, spaceflight.)

If we have more backwards types who want to hang on to coal and oil and reject renewables as "too liberal" or something, then we may well get to the point where the changeover is very painful indeed - and the remaining fossil stocks will not be able to cover the need for feedstocks.

If you look at 2016 and 2017 February tends to the best month for wind energy generation in Germany https://www.energy-charts.de/energy_pie ... 16&month=3
20% in Feb and just 12% in March.
Last few days of wind in Germany have been well below average. Getting as low as 2.5GW of 50GW wind capacity or 5%..If you bought a car and at times could only drive it at 5% the legal speed, you wouldn't buy it but with renewables most data told via mainstream media always refers to everything about it as something that can do 100% all the time.

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I tried posting on the Australian whirlpool forums renewable energy section and it didn't go down well. Everyone on there talks about new wind farms like this "that new 400MW windfarm is coming online soon and that extra 400MW is exactly what they need", when you tell them about capacity factor they get nasty, and often respond to my post with a dubiously broken up 20 individual posts/response to push my post out of the page thread and I noticed they don't do that when responding to others. This person even seemed to work in the wind industry so it seemed to me they don't even want people to know about capacity factor! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor
I keep getting little bits of feedback from looking at the renewables-industry that the only thing folks in the renewables industry want to do is mislead people, so I really like https://www.electricitymap.org/ because it makes looking at this stuff fun compared to just charts and helps inject useful information into peoples minds.

With South Australia, its been a couple of days of 40c heat and now its gone and of course the wind has picked up now that they don't actually need the electricity that was needed during those hot nights. And I expect that in the next day there wont be much wind as it seems the wind is there the never next day after some hot days and then dies away. Looks like during peak demand the wind that they were trying to utilized dropped suddenly and they had to pay $600 a MW/h to fill in the gap.

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One thing I have noticed in European countries with all the wind farms is they all have large hydro-storage that can help utilize the randomness of wind, even the little euro countries have hydro.

This is something South Australia will never have on any comparable level as they just don't get enough water, and its probably one of the reasons why South Australia trying to copy Europe has been such a failure. Sure we can build Snowy-hydro-storage this is going to be in Victoria closer to Sydney than Adelaide and it will be the only practical large hydro-storage to ever be built.

Whilst the S Australian state Govmt have established a visible example of a disfunctional power plan, they are not alone.
Victoria is rapidly following down the same track forcing coal plants to shut, and even QLD ,..a coal "Anchor" state has pledged to be 50% Re by 2030.
Federal Govrmt is no better, playing political word games and setting up commities and control organisations (NEG) to appear to have a plan.
The latest thought bubble is to distribute "Smart Meters" to consumers to support a "Demand Management". Program.
What that actually means they want to force consumers to change their lifestyle to reduce the demand peaks, and if necessary, they can use smart meters to regulate supply if things get critical.
Few in Politics see the seriousness of this situation, with mostly just blame shifting and finger pointing to score political points, Meanwhile , SA steams towards another inevitable power blackout at some point.
I dont want to see it happen, because of the cost , inconvenience, and danger, to alll residents, but i fear it will take a major power failure with serious consequences (deaths ?) before something significant is done.

Yes it seems like most Australians believe renewables will be cheap (except now via brute force in South Australia) and they trust their state governments can do a good job of making it happen despite everything so far. Malcome Turnbull while half half trying to be a conservative also can't help but be supportive of the most easily absorbable idea that renewables can solve all their problems.

This seems to be because media like the ABC manipulate opinions like marketing experts, for example as officially Hazelwood was meant to run until 2030 and only after the state government Daniel Andrews tripled the royalty rate for mining its coal did Hazelwood a few weeks later inform the government that they may as well just shutdown Hazelwood, which was shut down so abruptly that it later became a federal law you must give 3 years notice of a power-station shutdown to mitigate disasters that Daniel Andrews managed to create with Hazelwood which was just months.https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DUJIl5zVwAE4wCx.jpghttp://www.theage.com.au/victoria/victo ... ocymk.html
The thing is ABC news just pounded the public mind with claims the Hazelwood boilers had mysteriously become too old since the weeks since Daniel Andrews tripled the coal power-station royalty rates that caused Hazelwood owners to chose to abruptly announce Hazelwoods shutdown. People believed this claim by the ABC and it really just shows how much of a powerful grip the leftist media has on the general Australian public mind. Most people epically trust ABC, I think its mostly because when you don't see cheesy private advertisements between every piece of information you get from them it makes non-discerning people suck it down like a baby on its bottle. They never ever even raised a question that Hazelwood might be shutting down for other reasons other than sudden old boilers, this why abc is bad value for money.

It's the incredible bias that exists in peoples minds when people take sides in politics that over-rides the wider more obvious logic when presented with all the information. The ABC has made some incredibly clever baloney manipulative torpedoes of information into Victorian voters protecting Daniel Andrews and now the Victorian people are going to suffer as a result.

To get a window into the mind frame of Daniel Andrews the state premier leader, here is an article a few days ago about how he wanted to change ANZAC day (the official day to honor Australia's war dead) to also be spending time honoring indigenous people on the very same day. To me extreme unbalanced SJW ( for general explanation of SJW's https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUhc3Kv4ieE ) is a sign of a dysfunctional mind as a lot of these people tend to show such extreme narrow-mindedness to the point they tend to be incredibly comfortable wanting to kill other technically innocent people to help other people, they have technically become the equivalent of Adolf Hitler while wearing the badge of the ultimate humanitarian. More videos on the general explanation of SJW's https://youtu.be/iVQy9LWlGvMhttps://youtu.be/oFrZsGbO6N0https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_justice_warrior

It's easy to become over optimistic about solar for the rest of the world when you live in a warm, sunny place like California. But Australia could eventually do similar. NY will have to do near shore wind at the lakes edge and off of Long Island. And residents will need to stop resisting it.
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Coastal areas at least tend to be windy and those winds fairly regular/predictable. If you have a decent tidal range then there's the potential there for tidal hydro.

I have zero problem with continued fossil fuel usage where it is required on technical or practical grounds. Reduced and/or intermittent fossil fuel usage is a much better scenario than what we have now.

Well that chart is too coarse to show any individual days. Of which there will be many of weak sun and wind. The point is that we can extend our fossil fuel reserves but unless you want a black out you still have to keep nearly 100% dispatchable thermal back up. Storage can help but the scale of building out a couple days worth of 3TW/ 50TWh batteries for the world is unfathomable. Just for electricity. Multiply by at least 3 to replace all primary energy.

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Also, your own chart you posted shows Wind power fluctuating between 20-40% capacity factor over a 6 month period. Not 5%, not "no wind for days at a time".

Check some of the charts previously posted for Germany, or SAustralia, or watch the King Island "Dashboard" , ....there are many examples where the wind contribution is zero and below 10% for days.
The data is undeniable.

Coastal areas at least tend to be windy and those winds fairly regular/predictable. .

Im sure there is much thought put into location of Wind turbines, but that just makes the poor results worse !
It also suggests many of the best sites have already been exploited.
Wind may/may not be predictable, ...but it certainly is not consistant, or reliable....ask any sailor !

Germany has very poor sun in the winter like NY. Their contribution from solar barely PEAKED at 12% of the installed capacity for a couple hours.today. averaged 2.5% for the day? The wind is picking up a bit tonight. last night had very little wind and required 95% back up by thermal generation.They would have needed at least 500 GWh of storage to make it through the night without thermal generation. And they are probably using a similar amount of energy as heat for buildings on a cold day.
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Certainly, ...but there is a difference between "market economics", And a truely "free market" without subsidies, tax breaks, preferential supply agreements ,..etc.

Good point. Coal is currently being propped up by a corrupt government; they have also tried to legislate solar out of existence by putting draconian tariffs on panels. And of course nuclear has had billion-dollar government coverage for decades.

Let's level the playing field. No more subsidies for anyone. No government insurance for nuclear power plants. Utilities pay for the NRC, not the taxpayers. Everyone meets the same environmental standards, period, based on BACT for the best fossil fuel plant out there. Let's see what happens.

I have a feeling that most coal plants would shut down immediately, while a few would struggle on with massive scrubbers, USC HELE and/or CCS. Natural gas and renewables would continue to expand rapidly. Nuclear plants would shut down about ten seconds after the utility tried to get private insurance for them.

Building costs is only one component of power plant economic assesment. Designed Operating life , capacity factor, maintenance and operating costs, etc etc ......all have to be considered.

Exactly right. And with zero fuel costs, it's hard to beat renewables for long term cost.

It's easy to become over optimistic about solar for the rest of the world when you live in a warm, sunny place like California. But Australia could eventually do similar. NY will have to do near shore wind at the lakes edge and off of Long Island. And residents will need to stop resisting it.
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While I like electrictymap I think sometimes it doesn't work quite right in all area and its creators would argue that they just don't have all the data yet or the data generation providers aren't working properly atm.
I have no doubt electrictymap was created in mind to be as supportive to renewables as possible.
I have a screenshot showing Western Australia was running entirely via solar from last week. Failed to screenshot the map of Australia as it was striking to see almost half of Australia bright green colored.

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So people can be easily manipulated, especially if you want to sit on the bias side of renewables, for example in South Australia its demand from a hot day to a cold day the demand is almost half what it was so the wind can look like its doing a lot if you want to see it that way.
Also with California, if you mouse over the "Electricity production | Carbon emissions by source" bar charts it says California entire capacity generation is 10.2GW? (or now 9.96 since refreshing the page).. I don't know why that is, it might be it changes total capacity when solar is not on? as its amazing to think a city that has 40million people has less generation capacity than Australia NSW.
I think it must be that "total capacity" is whatever is currently available/online, which is kind of annoying. Germany stats tend to just have everything online 24/7 which makes it easier to understand.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California#Population

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South Australia earlier today was only using 1GW of power demand (compared to about 3GW demand 2 days ago on a hot day).
So South Australia with its 1.5GW of wind capacity technically has 150% renewables capacity in wind, at least earlier today when it didn't need much power.

One of the other really interesting things to look at is the price of $MW/h which is listed at the very bottom if the country/data provider allows you to view it.
Canada (Ontario) for example with its heavy nuclear usage is just $14 MW/h while its easy to spot $600MW/h on South Australia on a warm day and over $10,000 MW/h on a really hot day.

Canada vs South Australia electricity prices.

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I am pretty sure South Australia did go over $10,000MW/h on that day but maybe Electricitymap never thought any state would even need list numbers higher than that as that is 714 times more expensive than Canada.

Last edited by TheBeastie on Feb 11, 2018 5:02 am, edited 4 times in total.

There is also a live graphic of the Hornsdale (Tesla ) big battery....on this page.https://hornsdalepowerreserve.com.au
Interesting to see how the charge/discharge cycles correllate with the wholesale power cost variation !
And on the NEMwatch site, its also interesting to see what the battery contribution is to the power supply !!!!

And on the NEMwatch site, its also interesting to see what the battery contribution is to the power supply !!!!

Usually 30 MW under discharge, and when the wind is really blowing, up to 30 MW charge. The windows of high prices usually last about 2-3 hours.

They dont seem to wait for the wind to pick up, they just recharge whenever the cost drops sufficiently.
, but notice even "The Worlds Biggest Grid Scale battery", working fairly continuously , contributes only 900MWh , which is reported as "0" % of the total consumption !
...but earned its operators (cost SA tax payers ). Over $300,000 for providing 0% power !

It's not there to power the state, it's there to cover brief shortfalls. Anything after that is a bonus.

From the Hornsdale Power Reserve site....( note the project name also)

A portion of the battery will also be dedicated to trading on the electricity market. This capacity will be used to store power from the Hornsdale Wind Farm when demand is low and dispatch it when demand is high, reducing the need for expensive gas ‘peaking plants’ and placing downward pressure on power prices for South Australian consumers.......
.....At 100MW/129MWh, the Hornsdale Power Reserve is the largest lithium-ion battery in the world. When dispatching at peak output, the battery provides enough electricity to power the equivalent of 30,000 homes.

It has certainly succeeded in "Trading on the Electricity market" ,.... Earning several million dollars so far.
...but its contribution to reducing the peaker plant load seems to be officially 0%
Technically its incredible,
..As a commercial project its a brilliant success with huge financial returns..
. But as a Public Utility support, its hugely unimpressive and a financial scam on the SA consumers !